This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the invention(s). Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
The abbreviations and terms appearing in the description and drawings are defined as below.    3GPP Third Generation Partnership Project    ANR Automated Neighbor Relation    CCO Coverage & Capacity Optimization    COC Cell Outage Compensation    COD Cell Outage Detection    EM Element Manager    eNB enhanced NodeB, Base Station in E-UTRAN    E-UTRAN Evolved UTRAN    ICIC Inter-Cell Interference Coordination    IE Information Element    IOC Information Object Class    LTE Long Term Evolution    MDT Minimization of Drive Tests    MLB Mobility Load Balancing    MRO Mobility Robustness Optimization    NE Network Element    NM Network Manager    OAM Operation Administration and Maintenance    OPEX Operating Expense    PCI Physical Cell Identifier    SCF SON Coordination Function    SON Self-organizing Network
Self-organizing Network (SON) is an operator-caring feature in 3GPP/2 for both Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the 3rd Generation (3G) systems for reducing operating expense (OPEX) and some operators are even pushing it to 2G.
SON functions may be present in Network Element (NE, e.g., eNB), Element Manager (EM) and Network Manager (NM) levels of a network management structure. Thus, coordination of SON functions has to be supported across multiple levels.
A coordination method is helpful to avoid/resolve the negative impact brought by potentially conflicting individual SON functions. The coordination method could also help to support the needed interactions between some individual SON functions. Furthermore, the SON coordination method needs to make the specific coordination in line with operator's that is often defined by a set of policy or selections.
The SON coordination function (SCF) can be at NM level, at EM level, and also at NE (e.g., eNB) level. In case the SON coordination is at EM or NE level, operators have no way to know how the decision is made by the EM/NE-level SON coordination function for its conflicting SON functions, since the EM/NE-level SON coordination function is usually designed as vendor specific. The internal logic of this coordination function is usually neither seen nor yet controllable by operators. Thus, it presents a serious issue since different operators usually have different operational requirements and even a same operator can have different operational requirement at different time/circumstances.